February 15, 2009

This is what happens when you follow the leader and the leader was
just looking to get some attention by being the first one to do
something. When you enact policies based on whatever's trendy, don't
expect to accomplish anything.

If you actually want to accomplish something, you need to start with facts and logic and find out what really works.

But if you did that, you wouldn't be looking to reduce CO2 emissions in the first place.

February 03, 2009

Wouldn't it be wonderful to live in a world where we had clear solutions to the difficult problems of humanity? And if a way were found to get everyone to agree that those solutions were indeed the best solutions, we might even abolish war, or at least get rid of the kind of partisan bickering that so often stands in the way of implementing solutions to the crises that face us.

Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people.

The new institution, known as “Singularity University”, is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.

Google and Nasa’s backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil’s views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilisation.

To be housed at Nasa’s Ames Research Center, a stone’s-throw from the Googleplex, the Singularity University will offer courses on biotechnology, nano-technology and artificial intelligence.

The so-called “singularity” is a theorised period of rapid technological progress in the near future. Mr Kurzweil, an American inventor, popularised the term in his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near”.

Proponents say that during the singularity, machines will be able to improve themselves using artificial intelligence and that smarter-than-human computers will solve problems including energy scarcity, climate change and hunger.

The most dangerous lie is the one that is unspoken and undiscovered. A magician's sleight of hand takes our attention away from what is actually going on.

By focusing the audience's attention on the potential superiority of artificial intelligence, it may forget the axiom "garbage in, garbage out." Watch out for the wizard behind the curtain. Whomever writes the code for these super geniuses can disavow or ignore the assumptions and biases inherent in their programming and tell us our inferior intelligence may of course lead to disagreement with the result.

The brilliance of the idea is that, if we really believe that artificial intelligence is superior to that of humans, we will no longer be swayed by other humans pointing out the flaws in computer generated solutions for "energy scarcity, climate change and hunger." Sounds like climate change computer modeling on steroids.

The only negative statement in the article is phrased to make the critics of singularity utopia sound like hysterical paranoids:

Yet many critics call the singularity dangerous. Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race.

Well, if that's the only criticism, then let's go right ahead. Dump those tax dollars into this new venture. Politicians and social engineers are salivating.

December 10, 2008

Jim Inhofe's blog reports that the number of scientists disputing the UN's man-made global warming claims has increased significantly:

UN Blowback: More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims

POZNAN, Poland - The UN global warming conference currently underway
in Poland is about to face a serious challenge from over 650 dissenting
scientists from around the globe who are criticizing the climate claims
made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore. Set for release
this week, a newly updated U.S. Senate Minority Report features the
dissenting voices of over 650 international scientists, many current
and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN. The
report has added about 250 scientists (and growing) in 2008 to the over
400 scientists who spoke out in 2007. The over 650 dissenting
scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who
authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.

Some quotes from the dissenting scientists:

Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the
history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel
deceived by science and scientists.” - UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr.
Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.

“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to
others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel
Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by
people who are not geologists,” - Indian geologist Dr. Arun D.
Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported
International Year of the Planet.

December 04, 2008

Steven Milloy, the junkscience.com guy, tells us about
the little green guy invading the offices of the big green guy,
accusing the green goliath of collaborating with the enemy by
advocating cap and trade:

The activist group Environmental Defense got a taste of
what it used to dish out this week when its Washington, D.C., offices
were invaded by another green group, the Global Justice Ecology Project.

The Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP) essentially accused
Environmental Defense (ED) of collaborating with the enemy -- big
businesses that want cap-and-trade global warming legislation. Noting
that her father was one of ED's founders, GJEP head Rachel Smolker said
she was now "ashamed" of ED because it advocated cap-and-trade. Smolker
said that the European version of cap-and-trade, the Kyoto Protocol,
had "utterly failed" to reduce emissions and served "only to provide
huge profits for the world's most polluting industries."

"Instead of protecting the environment, ED now seems primarily
concerned with protecting corporate bottom lines. I can hear my father
rolling over in his grave," Smolker said.

November 16, 2008

When last month's temperature data from Russia was flat out wrong (somebody just copied over September's data for October), NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) went ahead and used it as the basis for its conclusion that October, 2008 was the hottest on record.

Oops.

Now it's admitting that it used bad data, and last month really wasn't all that hot.

Its excuse? It just takes the data it is fed and lacks the resources necessary to exercise any quality control over it. Of course, the two independent scientists that caught the errors apparently were able to do so on their own, without any of NASA's resources.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

But this isn't the first time this NASA Institute has gotten it wrong, and the Telegraph article points out the relationships between Al Gore, NASA's GISS and the chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who by the way is a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science:

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.

October 28, 2008

Courtesy of Anthony Watts,
we read that solar panel manufacturing could create a far greater
danger of increased greenhouse gases than anything anyone had imagined
so far. Because of a greenhouse gas emitted in the cleaning of
electronics that is a part of manufacturing solar panels:

On Lubos Motls The Reference Frame he has as pointed out
that a greenhouse gas emitted during the production of solar panels and
HDTVs, nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) that is used for cleaning the
electronics, is about 17,000 times more potent a greenhouse gas than
carbon dioxide.

The concentration of NF3 in the atmosphere was artificially
increased by a factor of 20 during the last two decades. The
measurements of the concentration surpassed the previous estimates by a
factor of five.

According to the Scripps Institute; “ the present 5,400 tons in the
atmosphere…is on the rise at 11 percent per year” - that will stay
there for 700+ years - creates the equivalent warming of all Finland’s
CO2 emissions.

According to Lubos, given the fact that the solar panels produce
about the same percentage of the global energy as Finland, it is
reasonable to guess that the state-of-the-art solar panels that would
replace fossil fuels would cause a comparable amount of warming per
Joule as fossil fuels.

So let’s just say - everything causes global warming, and leave it at that.

Given the fact that the solar panels produce about the
same percentage of the global energy as Finland, it is reasonable to
guess that the state-of-the-art solar panels that would replace fossil
fuels would cause a comparable amount of warming per Joule as fossil
fuels. ;-)

October 09, 2008

Like Leona Helmsley, some elitists believe that as long as you have
a lot of money, you needn't worry about your carbon footprint.
Check this out. The starting price for this little jaunt is $64,950:

Join us on a remarkable 25-day journey by a luxury
private jet. Touch down in some of the most astonishing places on the
planet to see the top wildlife, including gorillas, orangutans, rhinos,
lemurs and toucans. Explore natural and cultural treasures in remote
areas of South America, the South Pacific, Southeast Asia and Africa.

To reach these remote corners, travel on a specially outfitted
private jet that carries just 88 passengers in business-class comfort.
World-class experts – including WWF's director of species conservation
– will provide a series of lectures en route, and a professional staff
will be devoted to making your global adventure seamless and memorable.

Yes, it's sponsored by WWF, the World Wildlife Fund. Another page on its site reminds us of the seriousness of climate change:

Climate change is the number one environmental issue of
the 21st century. And the United States is one of the largest
contributors of greenhouse gases, with nearly five times the world
average in carbon emissions

But never mind that if you have enough bucks to pay to the WWF to go on its "luxury private jet" to see amazing wildlife.

Reminds me of the film, "Mine Your Own Business," a film begun by
filmmakers who initially wanted to serve the environmental goals that
they believed environmental organizations were pursuing, but who, in
the process of making the documentary, uncovered appalling inhumanity.
They capture in their film the incredible condescension of WWF bigwig
who showed off his yacht, while talking about how the quaint natives
really didn't need progress to lift them out of poverty. Watch the trailer.

"There's a highly capitalized and organized opposition
funded mostly by big foundations that oppose any development." He
likened the effort, which he said includes Greenpeace, World Wildlife
Fund, Wildlife Federation, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam and Christian
Aid, to a destroy all the traditional, blue-collar industries and turn
the West into "a playground for the rich."

September 04, 2008

Patrick J. Michaels, research professor of environmental sciences,
past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and
former program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the
American Meteorological Society, wrote a scathing review of the latest "Synthesis Report" draft coming out of the United States' Climate Change Science Program:

Trash the entire report. It's neither scientific nor
logical. It's a political document. Send the product lead back to
Asheville and the senior editor back to Hollywood.

Virtually every sentence can be contested or simply
ignores published science that disagrees with CCSP's preconceived
message. In its own words: "Aggressive near-term actions would be
required to alter the future path of human-induced warming... future
generations will inherit the legacy of our decisions."

If "future generations" and "legacy of our decisions" sound more to
you like politics rather than science, you're correct. The CCSP report
isn't a science document at all. Not unless global warming science is a
virtually one-sided world where almost everything is bad and getting
worse, and where a moderate response dishonors our progenitors.

Of course, this can't be. Global warming lengthens growing seasons.
Carbon dioxide, the cause of (part of the) warming (dormant for 11
years now) clearly improves crop yields in a world where stupid global
warming policies (like burning our food supply in cars) are increasing
food scarcity. If they have the money, by and large, Americans move to
a warmer climate. And so on - which is why the CCSP document and the
delete key should become intimate friends.

How did such a remarkable distortion see the light day? The "product
lead" is Tom Karl, who heads the Commerce Department's National
Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. He is perhaps the most
political and politically savvy climate scientist in U.S. history. When
Al Gore was vice president, he would issue monthly briefings on the
horrors of climate change. When Mr. Gore exaggerated some local flood,
or claimed Florida would burn because of global warming, Mr. Karl stood
by and remained mute. But now, with the prospect of an increasingly
Democratic Senate, and a president who will go along with the madness
of climatically futile policies (Barack Obama or John McCain on global
warming? Pick em!), Mr. Karl and CCSP have picked up the scent.

. . .
Want more evidence as to the perfidy of the CCSP process? The senior
editor is no climate scientist; it's Susan J. Hassol, who wrote the HBO
global warming "documentary," "Too Hot Not to Handle." Laurie David,
the force behind Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," was the executive
producer. This isn't science, it's science fiction.

The first illustration inside the front cover gives away the spin.
It's a picture of people of as many races and sexes as possible holding
hands. What that has to do with climate change science is a mystery,
but it certainly reflects a political view.

The draft CCSP report knowingly uses Photoshopped imagery of a
flood, uncritically publishes a misleading temperature history, which
splices together two completely different sets of climate data, and
generally assumes people are stupid.

There's a wonderful picture on Page 55 of two senior citizens,
captioned: "The elderly are especially vulnerable to extreme heat." If
that's true, then there must be massive and increasing numbers of
heat-related fatalities in hot cities with old populations. In fact,
Tampa and Phoenix have a disproportionately elderly population and very
few heat-related deaths; statistically, Tampa has the fewest of any
major U.S. city.

It may shock the CCSP, but when heat waves become more frequent,
people change their habits and localities adapt their infrastructure to
better deal with the heat.